Public Spend Forum is dedicated to public sector procurement and aims to be a global community and knowledge network for improving public procurement and the public sector market. In Europe alone, we are talking about well over a trillion Euros of money from taxpayers and citizens being spent by governments and public sector bodies. Worth doing well, you might consider.

Part of the PSF site is dedicated to Europe-related issues, and that is where you will find our articles and news stories from this week, and, on this occasion, from the holiday period. It will require a one-off, quick registration to view them. Please join us – follow the links in the summaries below.

The UK government’s Public Accounts Committee issued a damming report recently on the Ministry of Justice’s “offender tagging” programme, which aimed to use electronic monitoring devices to track and manage offenders. The report calls the programme a “catastrophic waste of public money.” It's not just that it cost more than planned, or took longer to deliver, but it has failed to deliver anything for more than five years, and is still announcing further delays to implementation. Here are our thougths on what we think are some of the issues for procurement.

The debate on military expenditure in the UK recently leads to some interesting questions about military expenditure, and in particular, comparisons between the UK and Russia. Recent stories in the press have suggested that the military might of Russia far outweighs that of the UK, and could threaten certainly Western European stability, and maybe even NATO itself. So let’s look at the numbers, since that's what procurement people are primarily concerned with ...